Rio Tinto is investing $29 million to build a new aluminum recycling facility at its Arvida Plant in Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, to expand its offering of low-carbon aluminum solutions for customers in the automotive, packaging and construction markets. According to Rio Tinto, the facility will make the company the first primary aluminum producer in North America to incorporate recycled post-consumer aluminum into aluminum alloys. The recycling center is expected to be operational in the second quarter of 2024 and will have an initial capacity of 30,000 tons per year. A remelting furnace equipped with regenerative burners and an automated scrap loading system will be installed in an existing building at the Arvida Plant. 

The year-over-year U.S. inflation rate through February 2022 hit a 40-year high of 7.9%, eroding purchasing power especially for gas, food and rent.

Siderforgerossi Group S.p.A., a global manufacturer of forged products and a portfolio company of KPS Capital Partners, completed the acquisition of Grupo Euskal Forging S.L. and its subsidiaries. Euskal Forging is a manufacturer of forgings and seamless rolled rings, including rings greater than 8 meters in diameter, serving the wind power and mining industries. Headquartered in Irura, Spain, the company operates three manufacturing facilities and has approximately 170 employees. Veneto, Italy-headquartered Siderforgerossi is a vertically integrated manufacturer of rolled and forged products with capabilities across the manufacturing spectrum, including open-die and closed-die forging. 

Today’s combustion systems are efficient, have low environmental footprint and deliver quality heating of the product.

High-temperature processes – such as those required to manufacture metal products – are very difficult to monitor, model and control.

Nucor Corp. is partnering with the University of Kentucky (UK) Research Foundation to test a carbon dioxide (CO₂) capture system at Nucor Steel Gallatin. This is one of 12 research projects being funded by a Department of Energy grant to advance point-source carbon-capture and storage technologies that can capture CO₂ emissions generated from natural gas power plants and industrial facilities that produce commodities like steel. More than 50 industry and university experts are working together to tackle the difficult challenge of applying carbon-capture and sequestration techniques to an electric-arc furnace (EAF) steelmaking process. Once this pilot is complete, Nucor and UK will have a better understanding of the costs and effectiveness of carbon-capture technology for flue gas with low CO₂ content and the feasibility of replication of this technology at other EAF steel mills.

SMS group has been chosen by Jindal Stainless Ltd. (JSL) to build a new blast furnace at its Kalinganagar unit in India. The blast furnace will have a production capacity of 2 million tons of hot metal per year. The plant will serve both existing downstream steelmaking facilities and future facilities. The blast furnace will be the first in JSL’s new stainless steel complex, which is currently based on electric-arc furnace (EAF) technology, and will be the core of JSL’s Kalinganagar plant expansion. Commissioning of the plant is expected by the end of 2023. The project is another step toward India’s goal of bringing the country’s domestic production to 300 million tons by the end of the decade.

Tenova was awarded a contract from Tosyali for the supply of an electric-arc furnace (EAF) for its plant in Bethioua, Algeria. This will be the second EAF that Tenova has supplied to this site and is a key component of Tosyali’s current expansion project. The new EAF will be designed to be almost identical to the current EAF, which was supplied in 2016. It will process 2.5 million metric tons of DRI pellets per year to produce hot-rolled coil (HRC). A charging system will allow charging and melting of more than 12 tons of HDRI (hot DRI) per minute. The composition of the DRI produced and processed at the Bethioua site is adjusted by blending iron concentrates from different sources to achieve the most profitable balance between cost of raw materials and energy.

A 500°F (260°C) top-loading, electrically heated oven is used for heat treating parts.

In a typical multi-burner furnace with numerous temperature measurement points, the change in a single burner’s firing rate can alter the thermal profile inside the furnace in a nonlinear fashion. Consequently, each independent tuning adjustment has cascading downstream effects on the rest of the system.